Norman Robert Foster, Baron Foster of Thames Bank, OM (born 1 June 1935) is an English architect and designer.

Foster was born in Manchester, England to a working class family. Leaving school at 16, he worked in the Manchester City Treasurer's office before joining National Service in the Royal Air Force. After he was discharged in 1961, Foster attended the University of Manchester's School of Architecture and City Planning. Later, he won a fellowship to the Yale School of Architecture, where he earned his Master's degree.

He co-founded Team 4 with Richard Rogers, whom he met at Yale. In 1967, he founded Foster Associates, which later became Foster and Partners. Between 1971 and 1983, Foster collaborated with Buckminster Fuller on several projects that became catalysts in the development of an environmentally sensitive approach to design. Today, Foster and Partners works with its engineering collaborators to integrate complex computer systems with the most basic physical laws, such as convection. The approach creates intelligent, efficient structures like the Swiss Re London headquarters at 30 St Mary Axe, nicknamed "The Gherkin", whose complex facade lets in air for passive cooling and then vents it as it warms and rises.

Foster's earlier designs reflected a sophisticated, machine-influenced high-tech vision. His style has since evolved into a more sublime, sharp-edged modernity.

Foster was knighted in 1990 and appointed to the Order of Merit in 1997. In 1999, he was created a life peer, as Baron Foster of Thames Bank, of Reddish in the County of Greater Manchester. He is the second British architect to win the Stirling Prize twice: the first for the American Hangar at the Imperial War Museum Duxford in 1998, and the second for 30 St Mary Axe in 2004. In consideration of his whole portfolio, Foster was awarded the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1999. He is also a Fellow of the Chartered Society of Designers and winner of the Minerva Medal, the Society's highest award.

He is known pejoratively to some in the United Kingdom as an über- or superstar-architect, the implication being that certain architects are given preferential status based on their fame. Foster's critics dismiss his ideas as a dystopian (rather than utopian) dream. He is known to British tabloid newspapers as "Lord Wobbly", in reference to the structural problems with his Millennium Bridge.

Foster is currently involved in a dispute with the Couper Collection, a floating art museum near his London offices, regarding his plans to redevelop the area and remove the museum's barges.

Ken Shuttleworth, a senior project architect at Foster and Partners, recently left the firm to set up his own architectural practice, MAKE Architects. Shuttleworth had contributed to some of the firm's most prominent projects in the past few years, including London City Hall and 30 St Mary Axe.